Jake's South African Adventure

Hello everyone! It has been another good week here in Michigan! We have some new people that we are teaching! Some truly amazing individuals and I am so grateful for the opportunity to meet with them and for all they do.  On Saturday we celebrated Elder Johnston's birthday and it was awesome! Me and Elder Anderson made him some breakfast, I baked him a cake and we went for a late night Bdubs run. It was awesome!  Lately I've been trying some new things! The first is a thing they call reading. I haven't read a book that isn't scripture in years now! But this week I read "Accomplishing the Impossible" by President Nelson and it is so good! Another thing I've been doing lately is taking some time for family history. Almost coincidentally, I found that I had ancestors buried right here in Grand Rapids Michigan! I have even found out where the grave sites are for two of them and am hoping to visit them sometime soon! Who would've thought that I would

Hello everyone! This week we experience our transfer! I have moved from Meridian to Grand Valley! Grand Valley is just outside of Grand Rapids and it is really cool. So far I have been super impressed by the member involvement here. There are a lot of amazing members in the ward and they are always willing to help!  My companion is Elder Diaz and he is super cool. We share an apartment with Elder Anderson and Elder Johnston. We all get along together really well and are enjoying our time here! I will say, we are kind of building things up from rock bottom. We showed up and there was no one being taught. Our area book only has about 20 names in it and no one seems interested. So we will do a lot of work on Facebook! Hopefully things will heat up soon but, it's given us a lot of great time to work more closely with the members.  We were able to join in on a lesson with the other Elders. This lesson was with 2 friends who are both devout evangelists. One is studying to become a

Hello everyone! It has been another great week here in Michigan. My mission experience so far has been really interesting. I got to Meridian, was trained here, trained 2 other missionaries, became a social media specialist, and it really felt like I was just taking things one step at a time, and then I look behind me and I have been here in Meridian for almost 5 months! That is insane to me! That being said, we got transfer calls this week and I am finally leaving Meridian to whitewash Grand Valley 2. I'm very sad to leave the amazing members I've gotten to know and the wonderful people we are teaching. Meridian was such an amazing place to be. But, I am super excited to go to Grand Valley. My companion will be Elder Diaz and we will be in the apartment with another companionship too. We will be really close to Lake Michigan too so it should be super fun!  On Friday we played a good prank on Elder Sorensen. We convinced him that we were getting transfer calls on Friday in

Hello everyone and happy new year!  It has been a great week here in Michigan! We are coming up on the very last week of the transfer now which is crazy! This week our companionship was able to coordinate and lead a pilot program for a new social media initiative we are trying to launch. 2 of the missions zones are participating in this pilot program so that we can get some projected numbers together for the mission. We are doing something that really no other mission has done and that is the use of area and subject matter specific Facebook groups. We have some really cool early successes and we are excited to see what comes out of it all.  Our zone has also been in a content competition with the Jackson zone which our companionship and the Jackson SMS companionship have launched. Our content creation was out of this world! We have a document where missionaries enter their captions for their content and that document went from being 1 page long to being 117 pages long. It was ins